than the fact that Richard Nixon is the only US President to have his name on the moon (inscribed on the plaques attached to the LM descent stages). No mention of the 3 preceding presidents who actually created NASA and started the push toward the moon. Just tricky Dick, who wasted no time in KILLING the Apollo program shortly thereafter.

On the bright side, those flags are surely bleached white and crumbled from all the UV radiation and thermal cycles they have seen over the last few decades. And the one left by Apollo 11 got knocked over when the LM lifted off....

But a drug company isn't going to push out an IND application for a drug that they aren't going to gain patent exclusivity for. So we aren't likely to see MDMA being marketed as a treatment for PTSD or anything else any time soon.

While fair labor conditions may only add minimally to the COST of production, the marketing department then decides that the retail PRICE of the product can be raised disproportionately to cash in on the cachet of an "ethical" product.

This doesn't make "ethical" a scam, it just points out that production costs are a tiny percentage of the selling price for most mass-produced consumer goods.

We aren't talking about millions of years timescale here. According to TFA, the last eruption was 33 years ago. This would make eruptions as much a part of the natural ebb and flow there as wildfires are in some areas.

No, this isn't a very "consoling fact", but it seems very anthropocentric to assume that nature is here to console you or any other human....

My point is that the characterization of a potential eruption as a "threat" to the ecosystem ignores the simple fact that the source of the "threat" is as natural a part of the ecosystem as the plants and animals that are being "threatened".

The species plants and animals that are living there have evolved in that place WITH the local geology. Periodic volcanic eruptions are an intrinsic PART of that particular ecosystem. The fact that the plants and animals are still there after untold numbers of past eruptions says something about how nature tends to shrug off these kinds of "threats".

It seems to me that using the word "threat" here is misplaced. This isn't something coming from outside this area to have a negative impact like your asteroid or some external pollution source. Yes, the eruption might very well change the biodiversity of the area in the short term. But such change itself is an intrinsic part of nature. It only seems to be considered as a bad thing by humans because some species of "cuddly animals" may be impacted.

An ecosystem is a community of living organisms in conjunction with the nonliving components of their environment (things like air, water and mineral soil), interacting as a system

The volcano would be one of the "nonliving components of the environment", which influences things around it (soil and air chemistry, microclimate, etc.), even in the periods between eruptions. Quite different to an inbound asteroid....